Gairik Acharya - Application Development with SAP Business Technology Platform

As a lifer within IBMs SAP practice, Ive enjoyed the incredible fortune of observing the SAP market across the globe for the past twenty-odd years. Along that journey, what Ive found most interesting during my travels is what has changedand what has not. Previously, so much of our work with clients on the SAP front was focused on enabling their transaction capabilities at greater scale and efficiency. Today, however, we are facing a far different landscape. Its now more about helping our clients gain the insights they need, quickly, to make better business decisions and advise them getting to that state of utopia they seek. And, let me be clear, digital transformation hasnt suddenly appeared. Its been evolving for quite some time now. Even 10 years ago, we had clients infusing automation into their business processes. Today, they are focused on delivering the next phase of their transformation journeysto become intelligent enterprises. This journey starts by making their SAP systems simpler, smarter, more connected, and more adaptable to the rest of their application portfolio to drive deeper levels of insight and automation to enable the best decisions possiblenow and into the future.

As enterprises move forward with advancing their ERP systems with SAP, the need to bring more agility and flexibility to their business models has never been more important. In todays environment, clients dont know what their next business model will be in 2 to 3 years, let alone 5 or 10 years down the road. So, the primary focus should be on ensuring the right technology is in place to allow the flexibility they need in their processes to take advantage of new business models. I also often find that these ERP systems either become anchors or platforms for growth. Both have their place, but Ive found that often enterprises need a platform for growth, as opposed to an anchor.

So, as enterprises look to modernize and embark on their journeys to SAP S/4HANA, consolidate their business processes, and move their SAP workloads to the cloud, customization has never been more critical. Previously, businesses built custom solutions on top of their ERP systems to address operational gaps that a product itself was not able to provide. Today, customization extends the digital enterprise and becomes crucial to supporting competitive advantages. Companies are increasingly differentiated by their ability to utilize data and execute business models that leverage digital transformation. But legacy enterprise systems were not designed for the needs of todays digital enterprise. They cannot provide the support required to effectively compete in a world dominated by big data, digital operating models, and nimble enterprises.

As a result, we need to move away from legacy development models and frameworks and embrace new architectures aligned to support the agile, digital enterprise. Development must give way to more loosely coupled, scalable, and dynamic development that embraces integrated applications, microservices, and modern user interfaces (UIs).

Here is exactly where SAP has been focusing its investmentespecially its newer capabilities including SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). New extension capabilities provided by SAP BTP, along with low-code/no-code technologies and newer approaches to custom development, now allow enterprises to realize a vision of innovation without the setbacks of the past. As a result, we are seeing a rapid uptake of SAP BTP among our clients, as it can interlock data platforms with business processes, acting essentially as a gatekeeper to infuse the righttrustworthydata into driving business decisions. With that view, SAP BTP has become the essential platform for connect data and artificial intelligence (AI) to business decisions. You must understand that intelligent enterprises are integrated enterprises. SAP BTP enables various forms of integration, such as on-premise (ground-to-ground), cloud-to-cloud, and hybrid integration. In addition, ready-made content exists for integration with third party systems, for business-to-business (B2B) integration, and even business-to-government (B2G) integration.